Janet Gave Me Felting Fever

Guess what I did yesterday?? I felted! I've got the felting fever, I do. Although these are not the best pictures to show off my efforts, by any means. But at least I *got* some photos. You might recall that my camera, she crapped out on me last week. (Um, you know, when I dropped her. Doh!)

Anyway, I played around with the Husqvarna ER10 needle-felter on loan from Aunt Janet. My idea was to use it to make some felted baubles to spin into my yarns, and these 'flowers' are what came out of the session yesterday afternoon:


What did I learn from my felting foray? Well, this machine isn't really designed to do 3-D felting; I needed to do some hand-felting of each flower after I used the machine, but the Husqy definitely sped up the sculpting process. I think I'll try some fabric embellishment next. This is a fun little machine!

Janet is a very cool chick; she's a member of our local fiber guild, The Humboldt Handweavers & Spinners, which is how I met her last year. She runs a small fiber processing mill in SoHum, Aunt Janet's Fiber Mill, and she has a brand-new shop on Etsy of the same name where she sells her hand-dyed fibers, mostly Romney. AND she's one of the nicest people I know! She's helped me out more times than I can say (Janet, you know you rock.). She's on Ravelry now; you can find her there as AuntJanetsfiber, & she's started a group there - Aunt Janet's Campout - to plan for a summer '09 mill campout & 'unconference'. There'll likely be workshops on dyeing, kumihomo, fiber processing, and various spinning techniques. Since the idea behind an unconference is that it is user-driven & user-supported, the workshop topics are limited only by who steps forward to lead them; sort of a 'put up or shut up' style of gathering. ;) So, if you're gonna be around in Humboldt this summer, check it out, it should be a hoot! (Did I just say that? Must need to jack up my piss-and-vinegar ratio in my coffee.)

Tags: fiber, felting